So every year it at this time sports writers across the country start writing about the coming year’s baseball hall of fame ballots, and every year my favorite player of all time, Rich Gossage gets praise heaped upon him yet somehow always falls short when it comes time for the actual voting. What gives? I’ve been doing my part to lobby on his behalf, wearing my custom made Gossage Yankees jersey every chance I get (yes, if you’ve seen an Asian guy with a Gossage jersey in Las Vegas, guess what, you’ve seen me). Somehow the people that get to vote have lost all concept of what the game was like back in the 70’s and 80’s. Look, you can Google “Gossage” and find tons of articles detailing how his statistical merits alone should get him into the HOF, so I won’t bother regurgitating numbers here. But what I do want to talk about are the other aspects of pure greatness that Gossage epitomized. If you want to talk about pure dominance, there was no other player in his era or since who was as lights out scary dominant as Goose was. Yes, I am saying that Goose Gossage was even better than Mariano Rivera is today. While Mo’s post-season numbers are better and he is respected by everyone in the game, I say that Goose was still better in nearly every aspect and because he was *feared* on top of being respected. Goose would pitch more innings, give up fewer hits, rack up way more strikeouts and just intimidate batters like nobody else. Mo is a nice guy with a sweet and easy delivery that helps disguise the actual heat of his pitches. Gossage was all legs and arms and a follow through that told you he just threw every atom of his being plateward in the form of his fastball. A delivery so wild you wouldn’t believe that he could ever truly control the location of his pitches. Yet he threw blazing strikes with remarkable consistency. But I’m sure as a batter, watching this wild man hurl everything he had into his fastball, you could never be 100% convinced that the ball might not fly out of control and crack you in your melon. Yes, batters were intimidated. Fearful. Never comfortable in the box. And if a batter froze, guess what, the pitch would catch the strike zone. And when they took feeble swings, they were helpless. When they took agressive swings, they’d miss by a mile too. That’s how great Goose was. I remember as a kid reading something Mike Lupica wrote about how opposing teams would peer into the Yankee bullpen and see that it was Goose warming up and walk away with their heads hung low because they just knew it was all over for them. And then Goose would make his way to the mound and just take the game over. And I mean game over. Period. Here comes the heat, try and do something with it. And they never could (well, except George Brett and his pine tarred bat). But come on, you just don’t see that kind of dominance, not even in Mo today (just ask the Red Sox). Nobody ever had Goose’s number; everybody feared him. He was The Man back when baseball was a game played by men, not prima donnas. Gossage, Nettles, Munson, these were some hard nosed players. The dominance of Gossage in the 70’s is a big reason why I became a lifelong Yankee fan. I remember as a kid hurling my nerf ball inside the house all the time, pretending I was Goose and driving my mom crazy. My mom was a seamstress who had a sewing machine at home, set up by the left side of the floor to ceiling windows/glass door leading to the balcony off the living room. The windows had sheer curtains with ruffles at knee height, so for me, that was the strike zone and the chair at the sewing machine was the left handed batter. There was also a tv stand to the right which was the right handed batter. So I would set up at the opposite end of the living room and fire my nerf ball at my knee high target on the curtain, doing just like Goose would do. Warming up, pretending to be in the bullpen. Coming out pretending to throw my 8 warmup pitches. Then the game was on. I’d lean forward, ball in my right hand behind my back, squint in for the sign (Goose always squinted), come to the set position and then deliver the pitch with everything I had, being sure to follow through just like ol’ number 54, with my right leg coming all the way forward and across my body almost making me fall over on every pitch. And when I could throw everything I had into a pitch and it would nail the outside corner, I felt like yeah, that’s Goose baby. But then of course sometimes my mom would actually be at the sewing machine working and I’d get a pitch a little too far inside to the left handed batter. That’s when I would get in big trouble. Come to think of it, maybe my mom was the only one more intimidating than Gossage back in those days.